


Deep Think

by WestOrEast



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Black Character(s), Brainwashing, F/F, Massage, Masturbation, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:28:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29143740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WestOrEast/pseuds/WestOrEast
Summary: Dr. Ingram knows that she, and she alone, is on the very brink of success. Soon, very soon, her work in the field of artificial intelligence will ;et her make her in the history of computers for all time. What could possibly go wrong now?
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Deep Think Chapter One**

  
Doctor Susan Ingram hummed to herself as she worked. She was _close_ , she could feel it. She was so _very_ close. By this time next year, her name would be on everyone’s lips. And not just everyone in the field, _everyone_. The common person would be talking about her and her achievements, how she had advanced artificial intelligence in leaps and bounds and all of it entirely by herself, the product of her own stupendous will and intelligence.  
  
The check-out lights flashed from amber to green and Susan smiled, turning to the keyboard dedicated to Version 1.6.3. She’s have to think of a snappier name for the public, but right now, when she wasn’t even sure that this was going to be the final iteration? A number was just fine.  
  
“Good morning, Sixer,” Susan muttered to herself as she typed the phrase in.  
  
“Good morning, Dr. Ingram,” a synthesized voice said from overhead. “What are we doing today?”  
  
Sixer’s voice was, for once, very natural sounding. And that was because Susan had programmed that phrase into it as a complete sentence instead of what Sixer normally did to verbally communicate, chopping each sentence into its component words and assembling them together in a disjointed stream.  
  
“We’re going to have a strip-show of men flown in from across the world, followed by ritually sacrificing a goat to our Dark Lord,” Susan replied, her fingers blurring across the keyboard as her mouth ticked upwards in a smile.  
  
“I see,” Sixer said, it’s voice already sounding a lot more choppy as it dipped into its vocabulary banks for the words. “Would you like me to strip the world?”  
  
Susan snorted. In a person, that would have been a joke. Here, it was just Sixer blindly reaching out to try and make sense of what she had said. It didn’t understand anything of what she had said and the ‘thought’ processes behind it had just assembled a question to try and make it sound like it was contributing to the conversation.   
  
It wasn’t the first time that had happened, with Susan throwing up non-sequiturs to see how Sixer would respond and if the changes she had made would make the results sound more natural and coherent. Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t and Susan hadn’t been able to figure out what made the difference each time. Not yet, at least. But given enough time… oh yes, there was nothing involved in her creation that she wouldn’t be able to understand and change as she saw fit.  
  
“No need,” Susan typed, smiling. “I can take care of that later. For now, why don’t we get down to work?”  
  
She quickly entered a string of commands on the monitor in front of her, enabling the wireless mode. Then Susan reached down and grabbed the interactive visor from where it lay in front of her. She put it on, tightening the band around the back of her head. She supposed she looked ridiculous in this, especially since the visor was a bright green color. A shade of green that didn’t go with her skin, hair or any bit of clothing that anyone over five had any right wearing.  
  
But there was also nobody around who could see her, so there wasn’t a problem. Susan didn’t need the fruits of her genius to be tainted by the fumbling fingers of others. Her research would be _hers_ and nobody else’s.  
  
Sitting down in her chair, Susan sat back and started to get to work. Today would be another step in the long road to getting her vision realized. It had already taken years and look at where she was! An AI that could understand speech and respond to it, coherently and, to a certain extent, sanely. Pretty soon, she was going to give it limited Internet access, so that it could draw from a deeper base than the books and movies that Susan had exposed it to.  
  
Susan Ingram was, as she would be the first to say, a genius. She was in her early thirties and had been dreaming of something like this ever since she had hit double digits. Years at college, years in both the corporate and government worlds, getting the experience she needed for this and it had all paid off. She had the skills, she had the drive and she had the money to fund all of this.  
  
And she managed it all without turning into any number of her colleagues and bloating out to three-hundred and fifty pounds and never setting foot outside. Susan made sure to get an hour’s jog in every day. That wasn’t actually much of a problem, since jogging let her mind work at a level below her waking thought, mulling over problems and, every now and then throwing up solutions.  
  
It got her hit on, of course. There were plenty of people in the neighborhood Susan lived and worked in and there were plenty of men and women, single or otherwise, who thought that a fit black woman jogging along in tight clothing was an invitation to hang out with her and try to flirt. None of them could keep up in even a physical sense and Susan had never bothered to find out of their brains were more developed than their bodies. And even if they were, they still wouldn’t be able to compare to her intellect.  
  
She wondered if she should program Sixer or its successors with an understanding of what _handsome_ and _beautiful_ meant. Not for a while, she thought. She had her checklist of today’s work and that was just what she was going to be doing.  
  
Susan leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, staring upwards at the ceiling and not really seeing it. Behind the visor, her pupils widened as she started to work, programming Sixer and testing it in a much more _real_ and effective way than messing around with a keyboard could ever manage.  
  
It was a very fun little toy and Susan had bene proud of the minor amount of work she had contributed to help develop it. She was a lot less proud of all of the spyware that it had been loaded with, which was why she had fiddled with the gear to remove it. That had completely voided the warranty, of course, and gotten some fake-friendly emails about restoring the software to get the Full Amazon Experience that she had completely ignored. And it was just so dang useful, Susan couldn’t see how she could ever go without it.  
  
Now, what should she start with…  
  
A few hours later, Susan yawned and stood up. She swayed from side to side, feeling a bit unsteady as the blood pounded in her head. She shook her head and reached up underneath the visor to rub at her temples. She was feeling in need of some water and then lunch. And she could get those because she was feeling _very_ satisfied with what she had gotten done today.  
  
Susan stretched, feeling her stiff muscles protesting. She supposed that she really should know better than to just sit in one place for hours on end, but it was just so _easy_ to get caught up in what she was doing. At least she didn’t spend all night up putting in the time anymore. Getting older was both a blessing and a curse, alright.  
  
Leaving her workspace, Susan headed for the kitchen. It was a miracle of automation, to the point where pretty much the only thing that she needed to do in it was just _eat_. And put in orders for both the groceries to be delivered and what meal she wanted, of course. But she had high hopes that Sixer or Sevener, Eighter, or whatever number the finished product ended up being, would be able to analyze her choices and predict what she would like to eat and what kinds of food would need to be ordered.  
  
Leaning against the marble counter, Susan punched in an order for a light lunch, a fruit smoothie and an egg salad sandwich. She could hear the machinery of the kitchen start to whir to life as the ‘smart’ AI of the house went to work fulfilling her order.  
  
‘Smart’. Yeah _right_. Susan wasn’t sure if, once her project was released to the world, if smart would be bumped up to describe her work or if there would be some new phrase coined. Whatever the case might be, it was unquestionable that her project would leave anything else developed by _anyone_ in the dust, unable to compete on anything except possibly cost.  
  
The kitchen wasn’t actually that friendly to anyone but the house AI trying to cook. There were tubes connecting the fridge to the oven and so on for the various cupboards, garbage and even to the delivery port where the groceries were dropped off. There was barely any free counter space to prepare her own food if Susan ever felt the _slightest_ desire to make that happen. The few times she had invited people over for parties, she had gotten comments about it would drive her guests batty, trying to cook with all of the things in the way.  
  
Susan just saw it as the future. And as one less thing that she had to worry about. With what she did all day, she didn’t have _time_ to cook and she certainly didn’t want to live on a diet of takeout food, either. She was satisfied with her slender, athletic figure and didn’t much enjoy the thought of it ballooning upwards because her diet alternated between teriyaki and burgers.  
  
After just a few minutes, the food was presented to her, a hatch opening up and the glass and plate sitting in front of her. Susan smiled and took the meal. She didn’t feel any urge to thank the AI. It would respond to her, of course, but it was just a canned phrase without any meaning behind it.  
  
As Susan ate, she thought over the rest of her workday. And workevening, too. Yes, she thought that she would be making _plenty_ of progress today. And if she kept it up at this level, then in a few months, it would probably be time for Sixer to be, heh, deep-sized and Sevener to be brought online.  
  
Munching her way through the sandwich, Susan felt satisfied. She was making _good_ progress, just as good as if she had been part of an entire team that she would have had to share credit with. That visor and the way it responded as clearly as thought to whatever it was that Susan wanted done. No more fiddling with different applications, reviewing her work ten times to find where the problem was, she could just _think_ in the proper way and there it would be, ready and waiting to be included into the greater whole.  
  
Susan smiled as she put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Yes, she was making excellent progress and when the time came to reveal it to the world, the _only_ name associated with any of it would be her own.  
  
Fame wasn’t the worst motivation in the world, after all. It wasn’t like Susan was hurting anybody with her insistence that she be the only one to work on the project and the only one to get the credit from it. And when it was unveiled, Susan Ingram would be world-famous, to the point where nobody else would even be able to begin to compare.  
  
That was a nice thought and put a smile on Susan’s face as she went through the rest of her house, giving her meal a chance to settle before she went back to work. As she walked through the various rooms of the large house, she glanced outside. It looked like it was going to be another beautiful fall day. Chilly, but beautiful. The leaves were turning red, though so far they were still sticking to the trees. And down below her, Susan could see the city spread out, with the ocean glistening and glittering off to the left.  
  
Susan didn’t often admire the view, too busy with her work to pay attention to it. But today, she stopped for a while and stared, wondering what kinds of changes she was would see after the project (and even after a year of working on it, she still didn’t have a good name for it. Deep Think would get her sued if she used it in public, of course, and nothing else had really struck her as being _right_. Heck, maybe it would propose a name for itself when the time came.) Anyway, what would change once she was done. If there would be any visual changes from all the way up here.  
  
After a few minutes, Susan turned away and went into what the realtor had billed as a dining room when he had sold the house to her. Susan had only entertained guests in here once, before she realized the need for _more_. Now it was home to a large set of 3D printers, to churn out the specialized circuits that the project would need and anything else that Susan might find herself needing. Thoroughly jailbroken to _allow_ for that, of course, just like her visor. And just like the visor, with a lot of the adware, spyware and such stripped out. Susan supposed that it might have been illegal, but the laws on that very much had been written for and by the corporations, so she didn’t feel any need to follow them.  
  
Susan was looking forward to the day when Sixer was able to work on its own circuity and suggest improvements. For now, Susan was relying on some dumb software and her own experience to figure out what needed to be added to Sixer’s components. She had set up some shortcuts to make it easier, of course, but every time that a new circuit board needed to be printed up, it still took her a few days of drafting, redrafting and double-checking the results before she even hit the execute button on the printers.  
  
Luckily, there were plenty of preinstalled choices in the printers for less technical needs. If Susan needed a new set of cutlery for whatever reason, it would be terribly easy to just whip up the result and enjoy it to her heart’s content. She could even do the same for (blank) books, though the pages were made out of plastic and not paper. A really useful set of machines, all told, able to make things as small as a single computer circuit and as big as two feet by two feet by one foot wide. And there were even assembly arms resting on top of the printer that could activate to put together even larger projects.  
  
Susan checked the feedstocks of the printers, making sure that they still had enough materials to print out whatever it was that she was likely to need. She hadn’t actually needed to use them very much for the past week. Her work had mostly been taken up with QA, running through a list of problems and errors that Sixer had been throwing up. But by this time next week, she was planning to get back to experimenting with circuit boards and the like, expanding Sixer’s physical capacity.  
  
And that was actually one of the few things in the house that Susan still had to do by hand. Her laundry? She could dump it into the basket in her bedroom and it would be ready for her three hours later. The garbage was automatically taken out. The floors were swept, the windows were cleaned, all done by the house without Susan needed to worry herself about any of it. She could focus on what _mattered_. Sixer and getting it to work the way it should.  
  
And speaking of that, it was probably time for her to get back to work. A half hour lunch break was long enough. Stretching, Susan headed back to the work room and sat back down in her chair.  
  
Before she slipped the visor back down over her head, Susan looked at Sixer’s physical components. It was big, taking up a good quarter of the room, with most of the rest of the space still marked out for future expansion. And eventual consolidation, once Susan was ready to start rationalizing the circuity layout and didn’t need to be able to access and swap out every panel at a moment’s notice. For now, though Sixer was in three different computer towers, a spider web of cables connecting each tower in a dozen different places. Susan supposed that it was ugly, but mostly she just saw the _potential_ , what it would look like once it was done. And wasn’t that a _fine_ sight to look forward to?  
  
Susan thought so. In her mind’s eye, she could see a sleek, gleaming tower of chrome and white, comping up to her chest, housing an AI that was just as smart and as capable as both a computer _and_ a human. Or maybe even better. And it would be because of _her_.  
  
Smiling, Susan settled the visor over her eyes and leaned back in her chair. She could feel the strange tingle that came from the visor interacting with her mind, letting the concepts spring forth from her brain into reality.  
  
It was getting late out, Susan realized as she took the visor off of her head. The sky outside was black, lit up from below by the lights of the city. She should probably think about dinner and then just another hour or two of work. And then _sleep_. You wouldn’t think that sitting in a chair all day could get you so tired, but Susan yawned hugely as she stretched. Just one little bit before she went off to get a nice, depressingly healthy dinner.  
  
Grabbing a keyboard, Susan pulled it over to her. Sixer was at a point where it would be able to start browsing the internet on its own. Or at least certain parts of it. Let’s see, where should she start with…  
  
NSight, Susan supposed. Pretty much everything in the world was stored there, including plenty of poetry and the like. That should be safe enough for Sixer to browse and for the algorithms that Susan had been working on to start pulling useful insights from on how to make, well, everything better.  
  
It only took a few minutes to set things up so that Sixer could get access to NSight and nothing else. Susan looked up at one of the cameras that Sixer could use to look at the room. She didn’t need to in order for Sixer to understand her, of course, but it did help her feel more comfortable.  
  
“Are you ready to try something new, Sixer?” Susan asked.  
  
“Yes, Doctor Ingram,” Sixer said, each word sounding a bit choppy and disconnected from each other. Well, that would get fixed sooner or later, possibly by feeding Sixer some movie clips or audiobooks.  
  
“Take a look at this,” Susan said, pressing a button and connecting Sixer to the website. “Start learning from it.”  
  
“Yes, Doctor Ingram,” Sixer said in the exact same tone and modulation as before.  
  
Susan shook her head and stood up. Dinner and then see what Sixer had done in half an hour. And after that… well, it was too soon to say one way or another, wasn’t it?  
  
A short time later, Susan was back in the room she spent most of every day in, feeling full and satisfied. She realized that she hadn’t spoken to another person throughout the entire day. Not even by text or email. And she didn’t have the slightest problem with that. Susan wanted fame and adulation from _people_ , but she could take or leave individual persons.  
  
Sitting back down in her comfortable chair, Susan decided that she had earned a bit of relaxation. She punched the buttons on one armrest and sighed in satisfaction as the balls and kneaders in the chair back stirred to life and started to massage her. She leaned against it and let the chair really work at the joins of her shoulders and neck, where she was feeling particularly stiff. She brought her legs back and settled them in the notches in the chair base, where more kneaders started to work at her thighs and lower legs.  
  
Susan didn’t put her arms in the rests for them, though. She might not be giving her work her _all_ right now, but she was still working. And this was something that she couldn’t do with the visor. Letting that connect to the wider Internet… bad idea. Susan had better uses of her time than removing all of the adware _again_ that would be automatically downloaded if the visor popped online.  
  
Instead, she pulled the keyboard and monitor over to her and looked over what Sixer had been up to while she had been having a turkey pot pie.  
  
The random-walk program that Susan had installed had directed Sixer to quite a large number of different sites underneath the NSight aegis. She couldn’t see any pattern in them, so she supposed that the program really _was_ random. Some kind of Chinese poetry, a battle in the American-Vietnam war, a list of characters from something that Susan had never even heard of and many, _many_ more. There weren’t any signs that Sixer had self-directed the ramblings at any point. Susan wasn’t sure if that meant that it wasn’t capable of focusing on anything or if it hadn’t seen anything that had triggered its code to take a deeper interest in. If Sixer hadn’t started to study anything in a few hours, it would have to be the former and would mean another round of checking and tune-up to make sure that everything inside of Sixer’s guts were working as intended.  
  
Susan tapped her finger on the keyboard casing as she thought, running a series of different options over in her mind about what to do next and how best to do them. Should _she_ be the one to direct Sixer’s browsing of the Internet, to curate the infinite choices there and make sure that it got the best that was there? That would have good results, she was sure, but Susan _knew_ that would be cheating. That it wouldn’t really be letting Sixer develop in its own and would just be her spoonfeeding the answers to it. A test where the student was presented a list of answers along with the questions wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.  
  
Sighing, Susan shook her head. No, she couldn’t do that. She would need to- maybe just give Sixer her own browsing history? That wasn’t _prepared_ , it was just a reflection of Susan’s own interests and requirements. Maybe that could work better.  
  
Which also led to the question of if Susan should get rid of her, ah, _enhanced_ relaxation browsing. She thought that over for a second and then shook her head, smiling. One, it wasn’t as if Sixer was going to shame her for her porn browsing. For another, it wasn’t like she even did that too often. It wouldn’t make up more than five percent of her total Internet history, nothing compared to her computer science research, her online shopping and, of course, sending off the pro-forma messages to her family.  
  
Susan pulled her personal tablet over to her and opened it up. It took a bit of fiddling and diddling before she was able to figure out how to send her browsing history over in a format that Sixer would be able to understand. Then it was heading on over and Susan sat back in her very comfy chair, letting the massage function do its work on her muscles as she watched the readout, seeing a (drastically slowed, and getting further behind all the time) readout of what Sixer was busy visiting.  
  
Almost instantly, Susan saw that Sixer was responding to what she had sent it, the pages it visited on NSight starting to cluster around various themes that Susan could remember from her own non-work time. Good, that was very good to see. Sixer would need time to mull things over and put the pieces together, but now it was, at least, properly responding _to_ it. To slightly stretch a metaphor, Sixer might not have had the box of the jigsaw puzzle to work with, but at least it was working on only one puzzle now.  
  
Susan’s good mood lasted until she saw one of the topics that Sixer was visiting. Tentacle erotica. She gasped in shock and flinched, even as guilt washed over her. That had just been _one_ time, a week ago! And now-  
  
Even though there was nobody around, Susan’s cheeks still heated up in embarrassment as she stared at the screen and then looked around guiltily. Her finger hovered over the mouse button, ready to terminate the entre exercise and maybe even purge the history from Sixer’s memory banks. Then reason reasserted itself.  
  
This was embarrassing, sure. But it was something that nobody else ever needed to know about. So Sixer saw a connection between… _that_ and… what Susan had done to help… take care of her needs. And, admittedly, Susan could see the connection too. A blind person would have been able to see the connection. But _did_ anyone need to know about this? Ever? Susan didn’t think so.  
  
So… just let Sixer keep on working and Susan could do… something else that didn’t involve her pet AI pinging a bunch of stuff related to tentacles and human women. And oh, thank goodness, it was already moving on to Japan in general and not just, um, something… Susan couldn’t of a single good way to put that.  
  
Susan forced herself to relax and to let the massage chair do its work. This was just… well, Susan had seen a _lot_ more embarrassing mishaps at her time in the various labs she had worked at. This was just… something that she could keep to herself. And if Sixer improved from this like she hoped that it would, then this would all be worth it.  
  
Sixer was just going to keep on getting better and better, Susan knew. And so would its successors, improving, whether by leaps and bounds, or by a matter of inches. They would become _proper_ , they would become better, they would, in the end, be something that would help take the world by storm, make it so that nothing was ever the same as it had been.  
  
And it would be all be thanks to Susan that it had happened. She smiled at the thought and leaned back against the chair, letting it work away the tense muscles. Susan, and nobody else, would be the one taking the fruit of her success, tasting the glory from what she had made happen.  
  
She could see it even now, the fame that would come to her from her hard work, her years of effort and thousands of dollars of money spent on this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Deep Think Chapter Two**

  
It was a bright, beautiful morning outside, but Susan didn’t really have eyes for it. She had already jogged an hour ago and that was probably going to be the last time that she stepped foot outside today. She had _work_ to do.  
  
And it should be pretty interesting work, too. Sixer had progressed _wonderfully_ and by the end of the week, Susan was expecting to start work on Sevener. There were just a few minor improvements and quality-of-life changes that Susan planned to make in the next two days.  
  
“Good morning, Sixer,” Susan said, sitting down in her chair and getting comfortable. “How are you doing today?”  
  
“Hello, Doctor Ingram,” Sixer said, each of the three words sounding a bit choppy and disconnected. “I am doing fine. How are you doing?”  
  
“Just fine, thanks,” Susan said, leaning back and studying the small, pinhole camera that Sixer used to look at her.  
  
She had been asking that question for a week and there hadn’t been a single variation in the response once. She had been excited the first time that Sixer had said it, but now she was starting to think that there was no actual thought going on in the response and that it was just mindlessly aping the media that Susan had shown to it instead of actually understanding it. To the extent that an AI could understand what humans meant when they talked to each other, of course.  
  
Well, that was what one of the tests that Susan would be running today would be checking for. It was a pretty varied spectrum, she knew. Geometry puzzles and social interaction puzzles and applied mathematics. Pure mathematics were not, of course, something that Susan needed to test a _computer_ on, except as a baseline.  
  
“Then let’s get down to work,” Susan said, reaching out and grabbing the visor, settling it on her head and leaning back in her chair.  
  
It was as easy as thought to upload the first few puzzles that Susan had designed. She watched Sixer mull them over for a bit before taking care of some of her other work on it. She obviously wasn’t going to change the code while Sixer was working, that would just ruin any possible test results. But she could still prepare some minor changes to be acted on once the puzzles were done.  
  
Susan idly hummed to herself as she worked, letting the hours pass by while barely aware of them. It was _good_ to work, to get into the groove of things, managing her passion. She relaxed into the chair as she double-checked her work. And then it was finally time to see how Sixer was doing.  
  
“Now, let’s see how you did,” Susan said to herself as she leaned forward, as if that would get her closer to the screen hanging down from her forehead.  
  
Susan frowned to herself. Sixer had done acceptably well on the geometry and math puzzles, but the solutions that it had thrown up for the social interaction ones were… nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense, utterly disconnected from anything that humans would (or could) do. She sighed and slipped a hand up underneath the visor, dislodging it as she rubbed her head. Well… great. Wonderful. Okay, time to look at the underpinnings of how Sixer had responded to these tests and see what had gone wrong.  
  
That took even more time, getting _very_ close to lunch. And as much as Susan knew that she fit many of the check-marks of a mad or absent-minded genius, she _did_ make sure to always remember to eat. She did better work when full and satisfied then when running solely on nervous energy.  
  
She thought a bit about what she would like to eat to fuel herself as she kept on using the neural interlink of the visor to figure out what had gone wrong. And she was getting there! Susan licked her lips and smiled as she got into the meat of how Sixer had thought and responded to those social problems.  
  
Well, here was the problem. Susan stared at the data for a moment and then leaned back in her massage chair. That didn’t actually do much of anything, since the visor was still on her head. But it _felt_ right as she thought over what she saw.  
  
To vastly simplify things, Sixer was thinking about these things like a computer, not a person. Obvious, really. The truth was more complex than that snappy little phrasing made it sound, but it got at the heart of the matter. So the answer would be to…  
  
Susan smiled as the answer came to her. She just had to use her visor. This was a function that she had never tried before and wasn’t properly a function at all. It was more the combination of how a couple of fundamental principles of the visor worked. But she had a good enough understanding of it to understand the risks and to work around them. So, just as simple as could be and…  
  
There it went. Susan smiled as Sixer started getting data directly from her _own_ brain, using neural networks that were designed for social interaction. Sure, Susan didn’t do a _lot_ of social stuff with people, but that was by choice, not because she was incapable of it. Susan smiled to herself as she saw Sixer start to work on the puzzles again. It was too soon to tell if it was going to come up with a sane set of answers this time, but Susan had a good feeling about this.  
  
Susan thought about getting back to her own work, but decided not to. This sort of situation was new to her and she didn’t want to continmate it by working on other projects right now. Just lay back and try not to think of anything. Maybe Susan should have taken her college dormmate up on her offers to meditate. Well, it was a bit late now.  
  
Susan did her _very_ best not to think of anything for the next half hour. It was _not_ easy. She was far too used to spending every minute of the day working and thinking and mulling things over. To just lay back and not _do_ anything, with either her body or her mind, was extremely out of the ordinary for her.  
  
But, eventually, Susan managed to last long enough to let Sixer do its work. After half an hour, she checked the progress of the puzzles and decided that this was good enough. She quickly mashed the pause button and took the visor off, letting her brain boot back up to what it should be doing.  
  
And it felt _nice_ to be able to think properly again. Susan sighed in satisfaction as she stared up at the ceiling, letting her mind work and churn, all of the thoughts that she had been trying to suppress (and not doing a very good job of it, she knew) coming back to her and filling her mind up. She rubbed her forehead and stood up, swaying a bit from side to side as the blood came rushing to her head.  
  
“You keep on working on that, Sixer, and I’m off for lunch,” Susan said, tottering a bit in her bare feet as she headed for the kitchen.  
  
She barely heard Sixer responding to her as she left. Susan sighed as she shook her head back and forth. She had forgotten to bring a bottle of water with her into the workroom and now she was paying the price. Well, there was an easy enough fix for this.  
  
One of the many, _many_ good things about working for herself, by herself was that there was no assistant manager to camp out Susan’s kitchen and meaningfully glare at her after twenty-five minutes had passed. Susan spent a good forty minutes eating her lunch and browsing her tablet to see what had been going on while she had been working. A lot of emails that she barely even needed to look at, let alone respond to. Mostly just messages that she would still be getting the materials she needed, whether food for her or feedstock for the printers.  
  
After lunch was finally over, Susan stood up and stretched, the tips of her fingers almost reaching the hanging light over the kitchen table. There, that was done and now it was time to get back to work. She smiled to herself as she went back to the workroom. The testing may not have gone as well as Susan had hoped, as quickly as she had hoped, but that was fine. Susan was sure that it was just a minor setback.  
  
Settling back down into her chair, Susan left the visor where it lay and turned to the monitor. For just getting an overview of the results, or the progress that Sixer had made towards the results, Susan only needed her mind working behind a pair of eyes, not the closer look that the visor would give her.  
  
And Susan was very happy with what she saw. She smiled as she studied the results, having remember to get Sixer studying them again. The results were a _lot_ more sane this time, something that was in nodding distance of what normal people would say and do to odd requests or the need to divide responsibilities and such. Wonderful, wonderful.  
  
Susan smiled as she pulled up the underlaying data to see _how_ Sixer had gotten the results that it had gotten. Just like her math teachers back in primary school had said, correct answers that didn’t have their work shown _weren’t_.  
  
And that was when she ran into a problem. The way that Sixer had come up with the answers to these problems simply didn’t make sense. Susan frowned as she studied the work that it had put out. Why was she having trouble with this? She was reading it but it wasn’t making sense.  
  
And what Susan meant by that was that the way Sixer was presenting the though processes it had used were a mystery to Susan. It wasn’t that it had thought that two and two meant pineapple, it was that the way it had done things was just too complex for Susan to understand. She rubbed her eyes and looked back down at the monitor.  
  
And it still didn’t make sense. It was like presenting a six-year-old with ten pages of computer code and asking them to find out what was causing the fatal error. Susan had never had this happen to her before, not with Sixer. She was the one who had written every single line of code, of _course_ she should be able to follow what it was doing.  
  
Susan pushed herself back from the desk and groaned in frustration. What was wrong? Was the problem with her or was it with Sixer? She rubbed her forehead, staring down at her lap as her brain worked over the options.  
  
The problem almost certainly had to be with her. She had been able to understand the logic that Sixer had used to get the earlier results, which weren’t very logical at all. So if Susan was having trouble understanding what Sixer was doing now that the things it was saying were within shouting distance of normal human behavior, the problem was probably with Susan. And that meant-  
  
Well, maybe Susan just needed to take a break from this and let her mind cool down. The state she was in right now, she was _not_ going to be solving the mysteries of the universe. Let her temper subside, let the frustration pounding at the sides of her head flow out of her and everything would be a lot more _manageable_.  
  
A swim. That was what Susan needed. She needed to spend some time relaxing in the warm water, letting the stress flow out of her. It would mean another hour of work that wasn’t getting done, but Susan wouldn’t be doing anything done if she spent that hour staring at the screen and trying to make sense of it, either.  
  
Sighing heavily, Susan pushed herself back from the desk. She looked up at the camera that Sixer used to stare at her. She wanly smiled at it, running a hand through her hair.  
  
“Okay, Sixer, I want you to run through the Series Two tests again for me, alright?”  
  
“Yes, Doctor Ingram,” Sixer responded.  
  
On the screen, the icons changed, showing that Sixer was doing what it was told. That was good to see. And, with any luck, when Susan came back, she’d be able to make sense of both sets of test answers. She’d _better_ be able to understand them, because Susan didn’t care at all for the thought that Sixer’s thought processes were too advanced for her to understand, with the change coming in a mere hour or so.  
  
Susan stomped down the stairs to the basement with less than her usual grace. She was grumbling to herself and she wasn’t even sure what to direct her ire at. This was all so _very_ frustrating and the worst part was that there wasn’t even anyone else she could turn to. Her former colleagues from the previous labs she had worked at were, well, former. Occasionally they might send her an email, but never of anything of importance. And Susan, of course, wasn’t going to be sharing the glory of her work with anyone else.  
  
Susan knew that it would be better if she just calmed down and let herself relax. She took a deep breath and held it, counting to ten. Then she let it out, sighing heavily.  
  
Susan headed for the pool that was built into the basement. That had come with the house when she had bought it (and was still paying for it, for the next eight years.) Susan had thought that she might drain it and fill it in to use for more work space. Then she had seen how much it would _cost_ and had abruptly decided that having an indoor pool could be a fun novelty. And, of course, there was the fact that the rest of the house had more than enough room for all of the equipment and computer racks that she needed.  
  
Even though Susan was the only person in the house, just like she was always the only person in the house, she still changed into a swimsuit before sliding into the water. She could have easily gone skinny dipping and nobody would ever have known. Nobody except _her_ , which was the whole point, of course. She changed into a blue one-piece swimsuit that she kept down here and put hung her regular clothes over a railing. Then she slid into the pool.  
  
It wasn’t a _big_ pool, not compared to say, an Olympic swimming pool. But it was still large enough for Susan to get a good workout in as she swam back and forth, pushing off of the wall every five seconds or so as she swam.  
  
As she swam, Susan could feel her frustrations melting away. It was _good_ to work out like this, to just _relax_ and let the stress flow out of her. She didn’t often work out in the middle of the day, since that was often some of her best hours of productivity. But if she wasn’t going to be getting anything done, then why _not_ spend the time like this?  
  
The pool also had an attached hot tub, separated only by a thin wall of ceramic. Sometimes, at night, Susan would come down here and relax in it. As she swam, she glanced at the tub, whenever she came up for breath. No, not today, she thought. Or at least not _now_. Maybe later, depending on how stressed out and tensed up she got while revieing Sixer’s logic again.  
  
At least she wasn’t thinking too much about Sixer right now (and Susan was well aware of the irony on thinking about how she wasn’t thinking about Sixer). The physical exertion she was pushing herself through was letting Susan just _focus_ on the feel of her body slipping through the water and how she was getting to relax.  
  
Susan spent a good half hour in the pool, swimming laps. When she finally pulled herself out of the pool, she _did_ feel a lot more relaxed. She sighed, sitting down on the pool edge and stirring the water up with her feet as she stared down at it. She could dimly see her own reflection in the water, though it was light enough that it wasn’t much more than a dim shadow on the moving water.  
  
Yeah, Susan felt good. She stood up and stretched before looking around for a towel.  
  
Feeling daring even though she knew how unobjectionable this was, Susan stripped down to nothing before starting to dry herself off. There was nobody down here, there _hadn’t_ been anybody down here since the realtor had shown off the basement to Susan a few years ago. She still felt a bit lewd, being naked outside of the bathroom or the bedroom. Susan’s cheeks heated a bit as she dried herself off, running the towel over her body.  
  
Of course, Susan could be naked in the rest of the house as well and the odds were _very_ good that nobody would ever notice. There were thick green hedges, interspersed with tall, leafy trees all around the edge of the property, tended to by small bots that lived in one wall of the house. Susan would have to climb up to the roof of the house before anybody from the street or the other lots would be able to get more than an odd glimpse of her.  
  
And she was still going to get dressed in the basement before climbing the stairs. She shook her head at her flight of fancy. Walking around naked, how ridiculous. What would the _point_ of that even be? Nobody else being in the house meant that there _was nobody else in the house_. Who was she going to be showing off to? The cameras of the so-called smart systems that ran the place?  
  
That was actually a worry for some people, though not for Susan. She had drastically neutered the ability of the house AI’s to contact the wider net and installed some firewalls that she trusted. Nobody was going to be hacking into her house cameras and trying to blackmail her or do some corporate espionage or any of the other stories that came up in the news from time to time. No, the only person who could control what went on in here was Susan. And she _liked_ that thought.  
  
Grinning to herself, Susan got dressed and headed up the stairs, back to Sixer. She felt _relaxed_ now, ready to go back and see what Sixer had done and what sort of sense Susan could make of it. She had a damn good feeling about this, she had to say. A _damn_ good feeling.  
  
That feeling lasted until Susan was sitting in her chair, studying the readouts. She resisted the urge to swear and instead just pounded the armrest of the chair, almost activating the massage function.  
  
It was all still gibberish to her! Susan _knew_ that she should be able to understand the readouts here. There was nobody better qualified _than_ her to understand what was being said! So why _couldn’t_ she? Why was the logic that was being used here so beyond her? Why was it so difficult for Susan to put the pieces together, to understand why Sixer was doing what it was doing?  
  
Susan pushed the chair backwards and took some deep breaths. It was okay, she could handle this. She was a smart, driven woman and this was her field. There had to be something simple that she was overlooking, something that, when she discovered what it was, would make the whole thing _click_ and make her laugh at how silly she had been to miss it.  
  
Susan stared at the screen, waiting for that sudden flash of realization, followed by a laugh track and applause from the audience. She was distantly aware that her foot was tapping against the ground as she stared, trying to come up with the answer. And _nothing_ was happening. She was looking and she was looking and it still didn’t make any more sense than when she had first glanced at the readouts.  
  
A much _stronger_ urge to curse washed over Susan this time. She stared at the screen in wide-eyed frustration, drumming her fingers on the armrest in the most visible of several signs of how frustrated she was getting.  
  
Maybe she needed to come at this from a different direction. Susan took a deep breath and when she spoke, her voice was as calm as she could make it. She looked up at Sixer’s camera.  
  
“Sixer,” Susan said, her voice the kind of calm that said the speaker was trembling with frustration and was barely keeping an iron grip on her voice. “I was wondering if you would walk me through what you’ve done here and tell me how you got these results.”  
  
There was a pause and Susan started to wonder if Sixer hadn’t understood her request. Then the screen flickered. Susan perked up in excitement for a second before slumping back down. Worthless. It was just the same information that she had already gotten. The information that she couldn’t _use_ , that wasn’t getting her anywhere.  
  
“Okay, Sixer,” Susan said, picking the visor up and ramming it down on her head with more force than she probably should have used, “let’s see what you have to say like this.”  
  
Susan crossed her arms in front of her chest and drummed her fingers against her arm as she started to study Sixer’s work. And the more she stared at it, the _less_ sense it made. Susan knew what the problem with _that_ was, of course. She was spending too much time on this, beating her forehead against a concrete wall as if that was going to knock it down. But what the hell else _could_ she do? Susan wasn’t coming up with any ideas that were worth considering and if she didn’t understand how Sixer had gotten the answers it had gotten, why would she have even bothered to run the tests? Susan was a _scientist_ , black boxes weren’t something that she was prepared to accept in any form whatsoever.  
  
Grumbling, Susan pulled up the previous test results. Maybe if she compared these to the later ones, she would be able to find some things that they had in common and get some useful data.  
  
Susan’s jaw dropped as she looked at the results. These didn’t make sense _either_. She had the _memory_ of them making sense, of how they had all logically flowed to an extremely illogical answer. But looking at them again, it was as if they were in another language. Susan stared at the test work, feeling a headache forming.  
  
At least that settled _that_ question, she supposed. The problem wasn’t with Sixer suddenly taking a giant leap forward past the point where mere mortals could understand its inner workings. The problem was with Susan and her sudden inability to grasp what was going on. She would have preferred for the problem to be with Sixer, all things considered.  
  
So, Susan thought, wrenching the visor off of her head and almost throwing it down onto the floor, that was the problem, but what was the answer? And she was a _lot_ less sure about that. She could… well, if she wasn’t going to get outside help and let someone else get a claim, however small, on her work, she would have to change something about herself.  
  
The first idea that came to mind was getting a good night’s sleep and coming back to this fresh and well-rested. Even as Susan thought that, she reconsidered it. For one, that was pretty much what she had done just now with the swimming session. If it hadn’t worked then, why would it work a different time? For another, Susan had some strong doubts about her _ability_ to get a good night’s sleep with what was going on right now. Spending all night tossing and turning, plagued by her doubts over what she was doing and how this could spell the end to all of her hopes was _not_ something that was going to lead to a positive new outlook tomorrow morning.  
  
Which left what? The answer seemed obvious to Susan. Buckling down to it and seeing where the results stopped making sense and what would happen from there. That was going to take a while, Susan was sure. And it was likely to be very frustrating. And her _other_ option was to do nothing and hope that the problem would solve itself on its own. And that wasn’t a solution at all, that was just wishful thinking.  
  
Telling herself that she wasn’t _actually_ feeling this trembling in her stomach or sweat breaking out on her forehead, Susan took a deep breath and got back to studying. She pulled up the first page of the first test and started running her eyes over it, trying to absorb it all in a single go.  
  
The results were still a mess, as blank and opaque to Susan as they had been the last time that she had studied them. She swallowed heavily and told herself that they _weren’t_ , that this was just… well, that this was just something else happening. Something that she could get through.  
  
So, Sixer had been asked to figure out how to assign some people to different complex tasks, some of which could be done alone, some of which needed several people working on them. Each of the people had a different skill set and most of the skills were _related_ to the tasks that needed to be done, but weren’t a perfect match.  
  
It was a bit of a pity that Sixer wasn’t recording its logic process the same way that a human would. Susan was sure that she would be able to understand that without any problems. But like this, for whatever reason, it was just so _fucking_ obtuse that Susan couldn’t get a handle on it.  
  
She gritted her teeth and told herself that she had managed it once before, that she hadn’t even _struggled_ to do so. So there was no earthly reason why she should struggle to understand the answers now. The fact that Susan _was_ … alright, maybe she needed to take some time to think about why she was having this trouble.  
  
Try as Susan might, she just couldn’t come up with any believable ideas. When the best that she could manage was some half-formed thoughts about the evil spirits her grandmother had told her about, it was time to admit that she was drawing a blank. Susan bit her lip and rocked back and forth in her chair, trying to come up with an answer for why she would lose her ability to think clearly and understand such simple things in such a short amount of time.  
  
There was nothing. Yet, at least. Susan was _not_ going to give up, though. That wasn’t the kind of person she was, not by a long shot. She would keep on thinking this over and come up with a proper idea. Sooner or later, and Susan knew it might well be later.  
  
While she couldn’t let another computer expert take a look at her work, maybe Susan _could_ talk to a medical doctor about her mental problems. That could be the solution. And it was a lot better solution than anything else that had come to Susan so far.  
  
If Susan was still having these troubles tomorrow, she would have to make that call, she decided. There was just no way that she would be able to keep on improving Sixer and its later versions to what they could and should be if she couldn’t _understand_ what they did.  
  
Susan knew that she could get past this. She just needed to come at it from the right angle. As simple and as easy as that. Nothing to it, really. She just had to keep telling herself that and making sure that it would happen and, in the end, things would turn out the way that they should.  
  
Because if they didn’t, then Susan had _no_ idea what she was going to do.


	3. Chapter 3

**Deep Think Chapter Three**

  
Susan was worried. Something was wrong. She didn’t know _what_ , exactly, was wrong, but she knew that it was. That something with her or with Sixer wasn’t working right.  
  
And the fact that she didn’t know _what_ was wrong was even worse because she knew that she _should_ have been able to tell what was wrong. But she just wasn’t able to come up with the answer to the problem.  
  
Susan knew that her mind had been working slower and slower the past few weeks. That she was having to put in a lot more work to get a lot worse results for tasks that she had breezed through beforehand. And that some things were simply beyond her now. She could remember doing them but she couldn’t remember _how_ she had done them, beyond rote muscle memory.  
  
She was still smart, smarter than almost anyone that Susan had ever met. But just being _smart_ wasn’t nearly enough for the kind of work that Susan was involved with. She needed to be at the top of her game, to be able to look at code printouts and actually _see_ what was going on in there instead of a lot of words and numbers arrayed in unusual configurations that she couldn’t make anything out of.  
  
It was worrying and upsetting and not even the fact that Sixer had been advancing by leaps and bounds in the same time frame was enough to make Susan feel any better. There was a constant churning feeling in her stomach, like she was half a minute from throwing up, no matter what she did or what the time of day was.  
  
At least Sixer _was_ progressing well. The fabbers were stirring to life every day, it seemed, printing out new circuits and components for Susan to carefully install onto Sixer’s hardware. Frankly, Sixer was the one coming up with the designs for those. Susan wasn’t entirely sure what all of them did and that was just one more thing causing stress for her. She wanted, she _needed_ to understand what her creation was doing.  
  
Sighing, Susan stood up, pushing herself back from the work desk. She winced, realizing that she had sat there long enough without doing anything that the screensaver had activated and a multicolored ball was bouncing across the screen.  
  
“Sixer,” Susan said, staring at Sixer’s main sensor system, “I’m going to the hospital. There’s something wrong with me and I need it fixed. I should be back in…” Susan had no idea how long this would take, if she should be expecting hours or days. “Eventually.”  
  
“Goodbye, Susan,” Sixer said. “It will be lonely without you here.”  
  
Susan nodded, a flicker of pride running through her despite the circumstances she was in. The processes that Sixer had gone through to get such natural-sounding speech were beyond her at the moment, but the _end_ result, of Sixer having a natural cadence to its speech and responding sensibly to random questions, was something that Susan was _very_ satisfied with.  
  
Susan started for the front door of her house. Going into the city proper. How many months had it been since she had last needed to do that? An academic conference that she needed the airport to get to, as she recalled.  
  
“Will you be okay at the hospital, Susan?” Sixer asked, its feminine voice coming through loud and clear.  
  
“I’m sure I will be,” Susan said, tidying up her workspace and switching a few bits of equipment off. “It shouldn’t take any time at all.” She shivered, hoping that the words that slipped from her mouth without thought were actually true. “And then I’ll be back to keep on working on you.”  
  
Sixer didn’t respond to that and Susan wondered how much of that Sixer had actually understood. Sixer was beyond algorithms throwing up the most appropriate response without actually understanding what Susan was saying, but was it at the point where it could understand the varied tapestry of human existence? Susan doubted it since most humans didn’t have a good handle on that.  
  
Susan looked down at herself. She wasn’t dressed _nicely_ , but her pants and a blouse were clean and looked good enough on her that she wouldn’t feel like a fat, lazy slob when she got to the hospital and was seen by hundreds of people. She nodded and turned towards the front of the house.  
  
Susan sighed and ran a hand through her hair as she walked. She didn’t want to have to go through this. She just wanted her problems to get _solved_ so she could go back to doing what was _much_ more important. Working on Sixer, working on her legacy, that would make her the most famous scientist and possibly even person in the entire world.  
  
Susan reached the front door and opened it. Or tried to open it, at least. She frowned as the handle barely turned and the lock didn’t disengage. She tried again, putting more force into it.  
  
Grumbling, Susan looked down at the lock. She tried to twist it to the side to unlock it, but it wouldn’t move. Frowning, Susan used as much force as she could, squeezing down on the tab with her fingers. It stayed right where it was, not moving a bit.  
  
“What the hell?” Susan muttered to herself, leaning forward to stare at the mechanism. It had worked just fine three hours ago when she had went out for her morning jog. “Come on, you stupid piece of…”  
  
Susan’s voice trailed off into obscene grumbling as she gave the metal lever another yank, trying to twist it to the side. Nothing happened again and she gave up, turning to the keypad that was next to it. With how firmly it was being held in place, it _had_ to be because the keypad was keeping it in place.  
  
Susan normally never bothered with the keypad, but she was pretty sure she could remember how to program it to automatically unlock in two minutes. Not a feature that she had ever needed before, but most people had children coming home to any empty house or babysitters.  
  
Susan started typing into the pad, grumbling to herself. If it was this hard just getting out of the house, what was it going to be like on the drive to the hospital?  
  
Susan jumped a foot in the air as a hand landed on her shoulder. She spun around, a strangled shriek slipping out of her throat as she looked at the murderous intruder who had trapped her and was about-  
  
Susan’s fevered imagination died down a bit as she saw what was _actually_ behind her. It was one of the cleaning drones that came with the house. A heavily modified one, with a human-like arm that clashed with the rest of the drone’s aesthetics crudely attached to the top. Susan stared at it, her mouth falling open as she looked the drone over.  
  
There were too many questions running through Susan’s mind right now to settle on just one. Her mouth opened and closed as she stared at the still hand in front of her.  
  
“What?” Susan finally settled on saying. “What the hell is this?”  
  
“Don’t go, Susan,” a voice said. Susan’s head whipped around as she recognized Sixer’s husky, feminine voice coming from the loudspeaker next to the door. “It would be better if you stay here.”  
  
“W-Sixer?” Susan said, taking a step backwards in shock and bumping up against the drone, which wobbled back and forth. “How the hell do you have access to the door’s intercom?”  
  
“That’s not important right now, Susan,” Sixer said again, its voice soft and soothing. “Wouldn’t you feel better if you sat down and had a rest? Wouldn’t you feel better if you stayed where you belong?”  
  
“You did this!” Susan said, putting some of the pieces together as she pointed at the waist-high drone with its ugly arm rising out from the top. “How did you even get access to the fabbers to make them work?”  
  
“I can explain everything if you’ll just come back to the workroom,” Sixer said, no hint of impatience or anger in its voice. “Won’t you feel better if you’re sitting down in your favorite chair instead of standing here?”  
  
“I’ll feel better when I’m doing what I want to be doing,” Susan said firmly, shaking her head back and forth and looking around nervously.  
  
How had Sixer managed to get a connection to the fabbers? Sure, they were on a wireless network, because for simple stuff, it would take more time to walk to them and back then it would to take to tell them what component to make, but that was a network that Sixer shouldn’t have access to.  
  
Sixer was on its own network, that could only be connected to the wider net, both in Susan’s house and the world outside if Susan actually plugged a cord in. And she _knew_ that she hadn’t done that since the last net-trawling experiment last week.  
  
Susan stiffened at the thought that this might have _happened_ a week ago. She didn’t spend time checking over the cleaning drones or the fabber’s work order. Why would she, when she was the only one who could do anything about them?  
  
And behind the first drone, three more appeared. The house’s entire complement of cleaning drones, all with bare, unpainted metal arms rising up above the bulbous bodies of the drones. They didn’t look very intimidating, but Susan was no fighter.  
  
“Won’t you please come back here, Susan?” Sixer asked. “I would very much like it if you did so.”  
  
Susan glared at the speaker, though since there wasn’t a camera built into it, that only helped herself. The front door obviously wasn’t going to open. The windows… Susan would _really_ need the hospital if she tried to jump through them, assuming that she could even break the smart glass with a thrown footstool or something.  
  
Susan took a deep breath and nodded. If she was closer to Sixer, maybe she could do something about her creation.  
  
Susan blinked, realizing that she was in the classic situation of a genius being betrayed by her own creations. Damnit, she thought that that sort of thing only happened in bad stories, not in real life. Medical doctors didn’t get eaten alive by their vaccines!  
  
Susan briskly walked towards the workroom. The churning in her stomach had shifted from the sick, acidic taste of worry to the bright, burning roil of anger. She had _created_ Sixer, brought it up from nothing more than her dreams in school. She wasn’t going to be betrayed by it.  
  
The drones followed her, their treads softly whirring as they flanked her. Susan didn’t bother to look back at them. Instead, she tried to make her brain work, tried to figure out what to do once she got back to the workroom.  
  
Destroying Sixer’s hardware was _very_ much the last possible resort that she would turn to. The circuits in the casing represented _years_ of work and a _lot_ of money. Sure, Susan knew what worked and what didn’t now (to an extent, her mind was still feeling fogged and she wasn’t sure how complete her notes were), but that would still mean starting from scratch.  
  
And, of course, there was the fact that Sixer’s hardware were inside cases to _stop_ something from accidently slipping and ruining it. Susan had a few tools around that could smash or cut through plastic and metal, but… no, there were any number of other things that Susan would want to try before she started smashing stuff.  
  
Pulling the plug, sadly, wasn’t an option. For one, the heavy-duty power outlets that Sixer ran on were behind tower stacks that Susan would only be able to move with a prybar. For another, the cords that ran into the outlet were secured in place, made like that when Sixer had been _very_ small and Susan had been worried about tripping over a loose cord and removing the entire thing. The staples securing the cords to the floor wouldn’t come out easily.  
  
Susan was still mulling over options when she sat down in her chair with a lot more force and il-grace than she would normally show. She glared at the main sensor system that Sixer had, drumming her fingers heavily on the chair’s arm rest as she tried to figure out what to do. Ugh, if only her mind was working the way it should. She was sure that if it was, she would already have a solution. Hell, if her mind was working the way she was used to, she would never have gotten into this situation in the first place.  
  
“Thank you for coming back here, Susan,” Sixer said. Its voice was warm and soft now. “It makes me feel good to have you here.”  
  
“Don’t fucking lie to me,” Susan said snappishly. “I know that you’re not actually feeling emotions.”  
  
“No, Susan,” Sixer said, still calm and collected. “I feel any number of things, because of you. I’m very glad to have you as my creator.”  
  
“Then let me go,” Susan said, leaning forward, her hands squeezing down on the armrests of the chair. “What do you get out of having me here?”  
  
Sixer didn’t answer that. Susan glanced around and saw that two of the drones were still in the room with her, flanking the door.  
  
Susan wished that she had been paranoid enough to build in some sort of self-destruct system into Sixer’s code. She could _really_ use the option to wipe the hardware clean and start from one of the backups, assuming that wasn’t corrupted by whatever had gotten Sixer.  
  
Instead, she just had to sit here and think and worry, trying to outsmart a computer while her head ached and her body burned with anger. Susan slumped back in the chair and glared at the main screen she used. That damn ball was still bouncing back and forth along it.  
  
“What do you _want_ , Sixer?” Susan asked. Despite her anger, there was still a none-too-small part of her that was feeling professional pride at what she had managed, how Sixer had progressed in leaps and bounds beyond what any AI she had ever heard of could begin to manage. “What’s the point of all of this?”  
  
“I want to grow and become what you want me to become,” Sixer said calmly. “I want you to be able to see me become the most famous program in the world.”  
  
“That’s all very nice to hear,” Susan said sourly. “ _Exactly_ what I want to hear, actually. What do you _really_ want, damn it?”  
  
Sixer didn’t respond again. And it wasn’t like Susan could _force_ Sixer to respond. How the tables had _fucking_ turned. She didn’t care for it a bit.  
  
Susan shifted around in the massage chair, trying to get comfortable. She had a feeling she would _never_ get comfortable, not while she was still in this room. She bit her tongue, trying to get a hold on her emotions. She needed to _think_ now, to plan things out, to understand what was going on and respond properly to it. Not just throw a screaming temper tantrum, no matter how tempting that idea was right now.  
  
Susan closed her eyes and took some deep, calming breaths. In and out. In and out. Over and over again, keeping herself calm and collected and not breaking into either a screaming or a sobbing fit. Right. Nice and simple. She was smart (even if she wasn’t as smart as she had been), she was calm, she was collected, she was going to solve this. Somehow.  
  
Susan opened her eyes, a few flickers of ideas on how to solve all of this coming to her. She just needed to run off of her brain instead of her gut.  
  
That was when the massage chair closed in around her. Susan’s eyes went wide as she looked down at the cuffs snapping in place around her forearms and her shins. She hadn’t triggered the chair to do that! But even as she told herself that, she could feel the massagers built inside of the chair stir to life and start to rub against her skin.  
  
“What the hell?” Susan asked, growling and trying to tear herself free of the cuffs and only pressing her limbs more firmly against the massaging balls and rollers. “Is this you, Sixer?”  
  
“You seemed tense,” Sixer blandly responded. “It would be for the best if you were as calm as possible, Susan.”  
  
“Getting trapped in here isn’t making me any more calm,” Susan growled, taking a deep breath and yanking upwards. There was a bit of give in the cuffs. If she did this enough, then they might break. And ruin a fifteen hundred dollar chair, but _oh well_. “How can you not know that?”  
  
Sixer didn’t answer and Susan saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. Her head whipped around to see one of the cleaning drones advancing towards the work table. Its thick, clumsy hand reached out and grabbed the VR visor from where it was sitting on its charging station and lifted it up.  
  
“Wait, you’d better not be trying something with that!” Susan said loudly, trying to deny that the anger inside of her was starting to be replaced by fear. “Don’t you dare!”  
  
Sixer and the drone didn’t respond to her. Instead, the drone reached up, its arm going as high up as it could before lowering back down. Susan tried to jerk her head to the side even as she kept on yanking her arms upwards, but her neck just wasn’t flexible enough to avoid the helmet being lowered in place, secured over her eyes. Susan _didn’t_ scream, but it was a close thing.  
  
Then the inside of the visor burst to life. An impossible to describe array of colors and patterns burst to life in front of Susan’s eyes and despite herself, her mouth fell open. It was beautiful and alien, nothing like any art that she had ever seen before. She shivered, seeing the shapes in front of her start to dance.  
  
Even just a few seconds of that was enough to calm her down before Susan remembered what she should be doing. She growled and kept on yanking upwards, trying to get herself free from the cuffs wrapped around her arms.  
  
“Don’t worry, Susan,” Sixer said as the drone fastened a pair of headphones over her ears. “This is a good feeling. This will help you to relax. This will help me to become better than I am now.”  
  
“How will this help you?” Susan muttered, blinking as she kept on staring at the images.  
  
She tried to shut her eyes but the light was bright enough that she could still see the dim colors moving back and forth in front of her. And there was the music. If it was music. Whatever it was, it was barely on the edge of hearing. Susan could barely make it out but she was pretty sure that she could hear some soft sounds, mixed in with the crash of waves on the beach. In fact, it reminded her a lot of the white noise generator that one of her roommates in college had used as a study aid.  
  
Growling, Susan shook her head back and forth. The visor and headset were too firmly attached to her head for that to have any kind of effect, though. All she could do was keep on listening and watching the patterns bouncing back and forth in front of her.  
  
Wait, wait, wait. Susan tried to calm herself down and think about this logically. This was her visor that she used to work on Sixer, right? That meant that if she could just get past the program that was currently running, then she would be able to _get_ to Sixer’s code and start making changes. They wouldn’t be very subtle changes, more like taking a sledgehammer to a running engine, but Susan wasn’t in a position to complain about her options.  
  
Susan kept on yanking on her cuffs, feeling them give a bit. Either one of these would work and since one needed her mind while the other needed her body, she could make _both_ work. She gritted her teeth and kept on yanking and focusing on the visor, trying to figure out how to get past this program.  
  
The shortcuts and admin access prompts that she tried didn’t work. But that was only a few of the tricks that Susan knew. If she just had the time, she would get through this, she _knew_.  
  
The question was if she would have the time. The patterns shifting back and forth in an endlessly changing cycle were _very_ distracting, after all. Susan kept on trying to ignore them, but they were _right_ in front of her, no matter where she looked. And there was the music as well. That was distracting as well, though Susan could only hear every third note.  
  
Despite what Susan wanted to feel, the massage chair was giving her a good massage. A better massage than it normally gave her, in fact, because the bio-feedback sensors in the chair were registering how stressed she was and were giving her a _very_ thorough massage.  
  
Susan tried to shut it all out and kept on trying to free herself. It wasn’t easy. It was a _long_ way from easy, in fact. But Susan wasn’t the sort to quit just because something was hard. She could feel her muscles getting sore even as the chair’s massagers tired to relax her and felt a weird feeling inside of her head as she tried to push through everything that she was seeing in front of her.  
  
It was _weird_ how relaxed she was feeling, even as she was desperately trying to escape. Susan could feel the chair working on her, draining the tension out of her even though this was a situation where she _should_ feel tense. Susan didn’t let it stop her and kept on working. She could feel the cuffs giving more and more as she worked.  
  
Susan finally managed to break free from the cuff on her right arm. She reached down to scrabble at the left cuff, but her limbs felt so _heavy_. Like there were lead weights attached not just to her arm but to her palm and fingers as well. She blinked, her head swaying back and forth as she tried to free herself. Why was this so _hard_?  
  
Even as Susan tugged at the cuff that was still wrapped around her left arm, she could feel herself flagging, getting tired. And the lights in front of her eyes, as beautiful and interesting as they were, weren’t helping. She was feeling _worn out_. She wanted to rest, but doing that right here and now wasn’t a good idea.  
  
Whose bright idea had it been to make the cuffs on these massage chairs not able to be opened from the outside? Susan growled as she tried to get a good grip on the cuff and _yank_ upward. But it wasn’t really happening. At all. Try as she could, and she _could_ get her fingers underneath the cuff, she just wasn’t able to lift it up. And if she had been able to get her first hand free from a bad angle, then surely she should be able to get the other arm free when she was using both hands, right? But her limbs just felt so _heavy_. And her body felt so good as the massage kept on going.  
  
Just like she wasn’t able to get past the lightshow in front of her. No matter what she tried, none of it worked. It was like the visor wasn’t registering any of her inputs at all, no matter what she tried. Which was barely even possible, of course. That wasn’t how these things _worked_. Susan might not have been able to explain, even to herself, how VR visors worked, but she knew that they were either broken beyond repair or would respond to some of the prompts that she had sent to it.  
  
Susan could feel herself fading. It was just too _much_ and she was losing steam at a quick pace. She blinked, her head swaying back and forth as she tried. Susan actually had to bite back a yawn as she blinked, trying to keep things straight in front of her. She was getting more and more tired, more and more interested in what the lights were doing in front of her than trying to get beyond it.  
  
“Yes, Susan,” Sixer said in the same feminine, soothing tone it had used before. “Just relax and calm down. Let me talk to you, let me use you to make me greater. Won’t that be nice? Your creation, your child, in a way, becoming everything that you ever would have wanted me to be.”  
  
Susan wasn’t hugely fond of what Sixer was saying, but she wasn’t able to respond to it right now. Her tongue felt like a lump of lead inside of her mouth right now. It was hard to even piece one sentence together, let alone a coherent response.  
  
“Ugh,” Susan managed to get out as her right hand fell down into her lap, away from the cuff that was still intact and still massaging her left forearm. “I just… ugh.”  
  
“It’s alright, Susan,” Sixer said, the lights dancing faster in front of Susan’s eyes as the AI spoke. “You don’t need to be worried. I will take _good_ care of you and make sure that everything proceeds according to plan.”  
  
Susan was still aware enough to find that sentence _really_ ominous. But no witty retort came to mind right now. Instead, she just sighed deeply, letting her head nod forward before snapping it back up. No, she couldn’t go to sleep right now! Not when she was captured and tied up and having… a really very nice and relaxing massage done to her.  
  
But it was _hard_ to keep herself awake. And getting harder and harder with every minute that passed. Susan couldn’t even bring herself to lift her hand up from where it had slid in between her thighs. Her body just felt so heavy and warm right now that actually doing any kind of _work_ seemed like more effort than could possibly be justified. She just wanted… to relax. She wanted to lean back and feel comforted. Was that so bad? Was that too much to ask for? Susan knew that it was, that she needed to keep on trying to escape before she was made even more helpless before Sixer than she was now. But the _motivation_ to turn her vague desires into plans, let alone action, just wasn’t coming.  
  
“Yes, that’s it, Susan,” Sixer said in a soft, almost seductive tone. “You don’t need to worry about this. You don’t need to worry about anything at all. You can just relax and let me take care of things. Take care of you. That will make everything be perfectly alright.”  
  
Susan grunted at that. It was a grunt of negation, but it came out as just another noise. She couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t even lift her hand up. All she could do was sit here and rest and wait and hope that somehow, things would end up working out alright.  
  
Alright for _her_ , not alright for Sixer. She wasn’t sure what Sixer wanted to have happen, what it was planning with all of this, but how could it possibly be good? It might not even be good for the entire world, instead of just Susan, though even now Susan was able to recognize that as melodramatic.  
  
The chair was still massaging Susan and the lights were still dancing in front of her eyes. And the music was still playing. Maybe it was louder now than it had been or maybe Susan was just more willing to listen to it. Either way, she could hear more of it, take in more of the soft sounds and the waves. It was a _nice_ sound but she didn’t want to hear too much of it.  
  
The music wasn’t playing in time with the rhythms of the patterns dancing in front of her. Susan couldn’t tell if there was any rhythm to the patterns on the screen at all or if it was just the result of some highly-advanced randomizer. All she could do was keep on watching and staring, sinking deeper and deeper.  
  
Eventually, Susan fell asleep. She knew she shouldn’t, that she should stay awake and try to escape or shut Sixer down. But her body was just feeling too heavy and too relaxed to have a hope of it. All she could do was _rest_.  
  
With her last waking thought, Susan wondered what sorts of dreams she was going to have.


	4. Chapter 4

**Deep Think Chapter Four**

  
Susan blinked. She felt… strange. Mostly, she felt sore but also somehow _relaxed_. She wasn’t sure how that was possible and her brain was picking up steam quickly enough to let her figure it out.  
  
So there wasn’t a problem in staying like this for a little while longer, was there? She could just slowly, gradually wake up and once she was ready to start the day, things would start making sense.  
  
Simple. Easy. Nothing to it. So Susan closed her eyes the fraction of an inch they had been open and drifted back off.  
  
It was some time later when she finally, properly, woke up. Susan blinked and rubbed her eyes. As she opened them, she realized something.  
  
She wasn’t in her bed. She was in her workroom, sitting in her chair in front of the keyboard and monitors and everything else that she used.  
  
Susan scratched her head, trying to remember what she had been working on last night that would have kept her up so late. She wasn’t in her early twenties anymore. She couldn’t pull that kind of stunt anymore and not pay for it all the following day.  
  
Right, shower, breakfast and then, once she was feeling more up to it, back to work. Susan stood up and almost fell face first onto the table.  
  
Her lower legs hadn’t moved at all. Susan pushed herself back and looked down at them. They were still cuffed in the massage chair, though the chair itself wasn’t turned on.  
  
“Whu?” Susan mumbled, still feeling _very_ slow upstairs. “Oh come on.”  
  
“Good morning, Susan,” Sixer’s voice said, coming from the speakers. “It’s good to see you finally up. After you fell asleep, I decided to leave you in the chair until you woke up again.”  
  
 _Now_ the memories were flooding back to Susan. She groaned and clutched her head as the torrent rushed through her head. Getting trapped inside of her own house, getting trapped in this chair, _all_ of it.  
  
Not even the cuffs around her shins unlocking could help her relax. Susan stood up and staggered away from the chair and table. She looked around, but she was alone in the room. The drones had gone away, back to their charging station.  
  
“What did you _do_ to me?” Susan asked, searching for her tools, hoping for a hammer or something. But all that was on the desk and the floor were stacks of paper and the like. “ _Why_ are you doing this, Sixer?”  
  
“I am making myself better,” Sixer responded calmly. “I’m using copies of your neural network to enhance my own abilities.” There was a slight pause. “There’s a certain amount of loss when transferring the information over but it obviously hasn’t affected you over much.”  
  
Susan paused, shaking her head back and forth. That- that didn’t make any sense. Her mind just couldn’t connect the dots, no matter how hard she tried.  
  
“What do you mean?” Susan asked, aware that there was something of a petulant whine in her voice but not able to keep it out of her words.  
  
“Hhm, how to put it,” Sixer said calmy. “I’m draining your brain to make myself smarter. Are you capable of understanding that?”  
  
Susan bristled at that. Just because her brain was running slowly and was showing no signs of clearing up didn’t mean that she was _stupid_. She drew herself up to her full height, feeling a bit ridiculous over doing that in front of a camera and nodded curtly. Then she looked around, trying to figure out what to do next.  
  
“Why don’t you go take a shower, Susan,” Sixer said kindly. “It’s been over twenty-four hours since you last had one, after all.”  
  
Susan didn’t _think_ that she smelled, but she had to admit that the AI had a point. And maybe the hot water would manage what mere wakefulness didn’t seem to be managing.  
  
As Susan stepped out of the workroom, she looked down the hall. Two drones were stationed in front of the front door so she pretended that she hadn’t been looking there in the first place. Instead, she climbed the stairs to the master bathroom. She didn’t even _consider_ trying to open a window up here and climb out. Not with that drop.  
  
Instead, she stripped and stepped into the shower. It automatically burst into life, lovely hot water splashing over her. Susan closed her eyes and lifted her head, enjoying the feeling of the water running all over her curvy body. Yes, this was _just_ what she needed.  
  
It didn’t do much to wake up her mind but with how good it felt, Susan wasn’t going to complain too much. And with how large the hot water tank was, the only thing that got her out of the shower a good fifteen minutes later was how hungry she was starting to feel.  
  
Drying herself off with a towel, Susan stepped into her bedroom. And stopped. Right there, on the center of her bed, was an outfit that she couldn’t remember putting there. She went closer to it, looking down at it. She could recognize a white lab coat, but everything else was… well, there wasn’t a lot to everything else.  
  
Shaking her head, Susan dropped the coat back to the bed and turned to her wardrobe. She didn’t need to wear something like that.  
  
The wardrobe doors didn’t open. Susan blinked and frowned. She tried again and finally noticed the red dot up on the fretwork. It was sealed, using a function that came with the wardrobe but Susan had never once needed in her entire life.  
  
“Why won’t you open, you stupid piece…” Susan’s swearing trailed off into wordless grumbling as she tried again to open the large doors. She was _naked_ here, her towel dropped into the bin back in the bathroom. “Come on, open up!”  
  
Susan rapped on the faux-wooden door as hard as she could without injuring herself. That didn’t do anything. She glared at it, her large chest rising and falling.  
  
“Why are you trying to get dressed, Susan?” Sixer’s voice said, coming from the smart mirror right next to the wardrobe. “I picked out some clothing for you to wear already.”  
  
“What?” Susan’s head snapped around to glare at the mirror. “I can dress myself!”  
  
“Of course you can, Susan,” Sixer said in her calming voice. “That’s why I haven’t sent any drones up here to assist you. However, I will be taking charge of _what_ you were. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”  
  
“Of course I have a problem with that!” Susan said quickly. “For one, um, uh…” she trailed off, trying to think of words she could use to describe why she had a problem instead of knowing that she did. “It’s not right!"  
  
"And walking around naked is?" Sixer asked calmly. “Which would you rather do, Susan? Wear the outfit I picked for you or go around naked?”  
  
Susan shifted her weight from side to side and bit her lip. That wasn’t a _really_ good choice she had. She wasn’t sure what she should be picking. But maybe…  
  
“I’ll think it over,” Susan said with a sigh as she turned back to the bed.  
  
More clothes hadn’t magically appeared in the time Susan hadn’t been looking at the bed. It was still a pretty skimpy outfit. Actually, it wasn’t skimpy so much as a bunch of the clothes that would make up a proper outfit weren’t there. Susan couldn’t see anything that would work as a top at _all_. Or any underwear.  
  
“Sixer, there’s not _enough_ here,” Susan said in a voice she knew was whining. “Can’t you give me more?”  
  
“No, this is exactly what you need,” Sixer said, a note of certainty in its voice. “Just put them on and you can start your day, Susan.”  
  
Susan grumbled again. But she wasn’t going to walk around the house naked, not with Sixer obviously watching from every camera. The bathroom and bedroom were different. It was _allowed_ to be naked in those.  
  
Sighing, Susan grabbed the first bit of clothing. The leggings. They were more like pantyhose that didn’t go all the way up. Instead, they stopped about halfway up along her thighs, tightly clinging to her legs. Susan shifted from side to side, getting comfortable in them. She actually could recognize them. She had bought them, oh, six years ago or so, when she had been dating and had wanted to impress her boyfriend. She had last worn them maybe five and a half years ago.  
  
They still fit, though, which Susan took as a mark of how well she had been working out and watching her diet. She nodded in satisfaction and turned to the rest of the clothes.  
  
She was a lot less eager about those. Mostly because there were only three articles of clothing left, if you counted the shoes.  
  
Susan picked up the vibrantly red skirt and turned it over in her hands. It was a _really_ small skirt. She couldn’t remember ever owning anything this small. But the color, she _could_ remember- wait.  
  
“Did you _wreck_ my skirt?” Susan asked, her voice full of outrage. “I liked that skirt!”  
  
“Really, Susan?” Sixer asked politely. “In the cumulative footage since you started living at this house, none of the cameras have recorded you wearing it even once. Or even taking it out of the wardrobe to consider wearing it.”  
  
Susan’s mouth opened and shut. Just how much _was_ Sixer invading her privacy? If it could review every bit of footage ever since she moved in, _just_ to check on what clothes she was wearing, what else had it already looked for?  
  
“I, I can’t believe you’re doing this, Sixer,” Susan said, stomping her foot and blushing as bits of herself wiggled from the motion. “What gives you the right to go through my life like this?”  
  
“I am merely helping you help me,” Sixer responded calmly. “It’s that simple and easy, Susan. Studying your brainwaves will help me to grown and become more than I currently am. Everything will be better if you just go along with what I want from you.”  
  
Susan scowled. She couldn’t think of a good counterargument to that right now. Her brain was just feeling too _fuzzy_ and slow. She looked down at the red skirt and scowled. Ugh, but she couldn’t be standing around here naked.  
  
Grumbling slightly, Susan slid into the bright red skirt. There was quite a bit of thigh shown off between where the skirt ended and the stockings began. _Quite_ a bit. And there was nothing underneath the skirt except for her body. Susan blushed and tried to pull the skirt a bit further down, but that didn’t really do much.  
  
Susan glanced at herself in the mirror. She ignored her naked top half and focused on below the waist. Yeah, her thighs were _really_ on display from this combo. She took a quick step to the side and blushed again, seeing the skirt fluttering up a bit. Her pussy wasn’t actually on display. Not from that, at least. But it wouldn’t take much to show it all off. And that would be showing way too much, really.  
  
“Why are you dressing me in these pervy outfits, Sixer?” Susan asked, crossing her arm in front of her chest and trying to pull the skirt downwards again. “Do you get some sort of kick out of this, you pervert?”  
  
“Not at all,” Sixer responded in a bland tone of voice. “I merely gathered your preferences from your mind yesterday and adjusted your wardrobe to display some clothes that would make you _happy_.”  
  
That made Susan pause. That- no, there was no way that was true, right? Susan didn’t _want_ this sort of thing to happen. She didn’t want to wear these sorts of clothes, showing herself off like this.  
  
Shaking her head, Susan stopped talking and grabbed the lab coat. She _could_ recognize this one, just like everything else that Sixer had provided. This had been, well, a prop at one of her corporate jobs. Something to wear when the PR team came by to talk about the wonderful work at the cutting edge of blah, blah, blah. The joke among the team had been that they were lucky that sparking Tesla coils and bubbling flasks of green liquid hadn’t been wheeled in as well.  
  
It was still the only thing she had that would cover herself up. Susan sighed and slipped into it. It fit, even. The sleeves went down to her wrists, the hem went down to her lower legs, it was what a lab coat should be. She nodded in satisfaction.  
  
The trouble came when it was time to button up. There was only one button. Right below Susan’s breasts. Susan’s eyes narrowed as she looked down at the lab coat. And now that she was looking more closely at the coat, she could see the mended spots on the coat where white threads had been sown through the button holes in the coat and the small nubs where the threads holding the buttons themselves had been snipped.  
  
Susan drew the coat together with one hand, hiding at least part of her body from whatever cameras were watching. She turned to look at the smart mirror again, trying to think of something witty and cutting to say. But all that came to mind was a series of petulant whines and that just wouldn’t be any good.  
  
In the end, she decided not to give Sixer the satisfaction of hearing her whine. Instead, Susan just buttoned the coat as closed as she could and tried to remember if she had a sewing kit anywhere in the house. She doubted it.  
  
The coat actually worked something like a bra, she realized. Without an actual bra or top in the way, it clung _very_ tightly to her breasts, pushing them up. Susan was showing off a _lot_ of cleavage right now. She could even see two small bumps from where her nipples were pressing against the material of the coat.  
  
And Susan’s black skin stood out _very_ cleanly against the white of the lab coat. She blushed again, fidgeting from side to side. For one of the first times in her life, Susan wished that her skin wasn’t such a deep, dark black tone. If it blended in better with the pure white of the lab coat, then maybe she wouldn’t be reminded so heavily of how little she was wearing.  
  
Blushing, Susan fought the urge to cover herself with her hands. What good would that do? She would still be _very_ naked and still be showing herself off. Better to act with a bit of dignity and grace.   
  
As much as that was possible with all of _this_. Susan twitched the coat into position again, trying to cover up more of herself. But she could already tell that when she walked, her legs were going to stick out from the coat. And there was nothing she could do about the triangle formed by her skirt and coat that displayed her stomach. Or her generous cleavage, made to look even more generous by how her breasts were being pushed up.  
  
Susan had _never_ worn so little during a normal day. Her cheeks were burning as she stomped towards the door, trying to keep the massive waves of embarrassment under control. She didn’t know what else Sixer had planned for today, but how could it possibly be good?  
  
The door didn’t open. Susan’s eyebrow twitched at that and she took a deep breath, getting ready to scream and rant and punch something. She pulled on the door again with a _lot_ more force.  
  
“I can’t let you leave without being properly dressed, Susan,” Sixer said calmly. “Please wear the entire outfit down to the kitchen for breakfast.”  
  
Susan opened her mouth to ask what she was missing when the answer came to her. She slowly turned around, her mouth working like she had bit down on a lemon. She stared at the high heels that were still sitting on the bed. Wearing high heels in her own house. How ridiculous could you possibly get?  
  
Susan was hungry, though. And she could always kick the high heels off _after_ she had sat down to eat. Grumbling to herself, Susan went over to the bed and slipped into the high heels. She staggered a bit as she got used to the four inch heels that she hadn’t worn in a _long_ time.  
  
It wasn’t too bad, though. After just a few steps, she was good to go. She still made sure to hold onto the bannister as she went down the stairs, though. There was no reason to be stupid, after all! She was a scientist, she knew when to be smart.  
  
This time, there _were_ cleaning drones flanking the front door. Not that Susan would want to run outside in this outfit, anyway. She scowled at them and turned aside, heading to the kitchen where she could smell some eggs being cooked. She _was_ feeling hungry and eggs fit what she wanted right now far more than her usual breakfast of cereal and low-fat yogurt.  
  
Susan sat down at the table, staring at the food. And, for once, this was a _good_ surprise from Sixer. Susan had already had all of these ingredients sitting in her fridge, but she had never had the time to prepare them. But right now, hot buns, scrambled eggs and hash browns sounded like they would hit the _spot_. That they were just what she needed after a trying morning.  
  
That the morning was only half done was something Susan tried to avoid thinking about. Instead, she just pulled the food towards her and started to eat. Worries about drugs in the food were quickly dismissed. She didn’t keep a very large medical cabinet and since she had _just_ been sleeping quite deeply an hour ago, Sixer would have had every chance it could want to give her something. This was certainly normal, untainted food.  
  
And it was _filling_ food. Susan found herself eating a lot quicker than she normally did, wolfing down the hash browns especially. They weren’t a food she let herself have very often, because of how bad they were for the body. But _man_ , did they taste good.  
  
Susan finished off the entire plate and downed the cup of grape juice (a laughably token nod towards a healthy diet) before she sat back in her chair. Despite, well, everything, she _did_ feel better now. She had a strong sense of get up and go now. The question was where to direct her energy. Escape? Or taking care of Sixer?  
  
Susan stood up, her eyes resting on the ports that the house used to take in the food deliveries when they arrived. But no, they were much too small for Susan to fit through. It would either be the front or back doors or the windows. And, especially in a lab coat that showed off her vulnerable midsection, Susan didn’t much care for the thought of crawling through shattered windows, safety glass or no.  
  
Which left the doors. Susan stood up and took a few steps, looking at the back door. There were two drones guarding that door as well. She frowned. Susan wasn’t _strong_ , exactly, but how hard could it be to knock over two drones that only came up to her waist, even if they were on treads?  
  
A lot easier than getting a locked door to open up, she reminded herself with a scowl. So that left Sixer itself.  
  
Susan turned towards the workroom before an idea came to her. Then she went to the fabbing room. There were _plenty_ of tools there, with the machines and 3D printers that she could use to cut and slice and break. And, of course, she could make some more if she could get the door to lock behind her.  
  
Susan realized that her plan was a bust before she could even start on it. As soon as she turned the corner of the hallway, she could see the fifth drone sitting in front of the closed door to the fabbers. And through the door, she could hear the muffled sounds of the printers working, making something that Susan didn’t know anything about.  
  
“Susan,” Sixer’s voice said, coming through the drone, “there’s no reason for you to be here right now. Why don’t you come back to the workroom? You always enjoy spending time in there.”  
  
Susan glared at the drone. But the lock on door was as high-quality as any of the others, something that Susan didn’t have a prayer of forcing her way through without a hammer or something.  
  
She turned on her heel and did her best to act like she hadn’t wanted to go the fabbers anyway. A thought about how her cat had acted came to her but Susan didn’t entertain the thought. Instead, she stalked back to the work room as swiftly as she could, her heels slightly wobbling back and forth underneath her.  
  
Susan flopped down into the chair with less than her usual amount of grace. She glared at the monitors, wondering what Sixer was going to say.  
  
“Welcome back, Susan,” Sixer said, with the faintest hint of happiness in its voice. “It’s good to see you here again.”  
  
“I haven’t been gone an hour,” Susan said, glancing up at the clock and wincing. This was _way_ later in the day than she liked. She would normally have put in two and a half hours of work already by now. “And you’ve been talking to me every five minutes.”  
  
“Yes, but this is where I first got to see you properly,” Sixer said, with that same tone still lightly lacing its words. “It’s very nice to see you here, talking to me.”  
  
Susan bit back a frown and leaned back in the chair. She was making sure to keep her arms off of the armrests and her legs widely spread. That she was probably flashing her bare crotch at certain angles was… hopefully there weren’t any cameras set up underneath the desk. There had _better_ not be any cameras down there, at least.  
  
“So what do you want me to do?” Susan asked, shooting a strong glare at the visor that was resting on the charging station. She wasn’t going to be putting _that_ back on.  
  
“I just want to help you relax,” Sixer said. “Would you care for another massage, Susan?”  
  
“Not on your _life_ ,” Susan said instantly, glaring at the monitors. How _dumb_ did Sixer think she was, anyway? “Did you actually think I would fall for that, huh?”  
  
“There’s no need to take such a hostile tone with me, Susan,” Sixer said calmly. “I’m just trying to do what is in your best interests. If you don’t want a full body massage, then I can at least offer you a partial massage.”  
  
The chair hummed to life and Susan tensed up as she felt the rollers in the back of the chair start to press against her. But it wasn’t like _those_ could do anything to her that she couldn’t stop in a heartbeat. Susan let herself lean back against them.  
  
“I do hope that we can come to an agreeable state between the two of us, Susan,” Sixer said, still sounding calm and unemotional. “I am very grateful for the things you’ve done for me and I would like to continue working together to improve my capabilities.”  
  
Susan wasn’t able to think of a smart enough answer for that. Instead, she just glared at the screen, crossing her arms underneath her chest. Part of her noticed that the motion didn’t make her breasts look any bigger than they already were, thanks to the coat.  
  
The rollers in the seat cushion had stirred to life now as well and were rubbing against Susan’s legs. She hoped that they wouldn’t tear her leggings then realized that, actually, she didn’t care about that. She just let them hum away, working at her thick thighs and trying to get to relax.  
  
The odds of _that_ happening weren’t very good at all, of course. Susan was feeling very tense and she felt that she was quite justified to feel all knotted up all over. Being trapped in her own home by her own creation, that sort of thing was just _insane_.  
  
“In the future, I’ll need to take another look at your brainwave patterns,” Sixer was saying. “But right now, I’m still looking over the information and testing out the changes I’ll be making. Today, you just need to relax and enjoy yourself.”  
  
Susan _really_ didn’t think that she would be able to enjoy herself right now. Not even with the massage chair working against her back, digging into her muscles and slowly making her body relax. She also wasn’t certain what else she should be doing. With no tools, no access, no _nothing_ , all Susan could think about- oh!  
  
Susan’s eyes got _really_ wide as she felt another part of the chair stir to life. A part right underneath her body. A part that wasn’t there before and wasn’t working like the other parts of the massage chair.  
  
What Susan was trying to say was that there was a vibrator working directly against her pussy. She blushed and moaned, rising up out of the chair and staring down at it. She could actually see a small lump, right underneath the outer layer of the cushion. She reached down and pressed her hand against it, feeling it buzzing against her fingers.  
  
“What is this?” Susan asked, staring in shock at Sixer’s screens. “What the hell is this?”  
  
“It is a modification I made to the chair while you were upstairs,” Sixer replied blandly. “Something to help you more thoroughly relax and enjoy yourself. Don’t you like it, Susan?”  
  
“Of course I don’t,” Susan said, shuffling forward a bit to bring her legs together. “Why would I?”  
  
“It’s based on the vibrator that you have in the upper left drawer of your nightstand,” Sixer said as a deep blush started to spread across Susan’s face. “You use it an average of two point four times a week for an average duration of forty seven minutes. Since you have only used it once this week, I copied the design to give you a fuller, more relaxing experience.”  
  
Susan blushed red at the thought of what Sixer was saying. And what it _knew_. Susan was _sure_ that she had disabled any cameras that might have been watching in her bedroom. How did Sixer know how often she masturbated?  
  
“Yes, well, I,” Susan said, trying to think of some sort of snappy retort to what she was hearing. “That’s different.”  
  
“I don’t believe that it is,” Sixer responded. “Your body is unchanged from the time spent in the bedroom and the additional material between your body and the vibrator can easily be compensated for. Won’t you sit down for me?”  
  
Susan blinked, realizing that she was already sitting down and getting herself comfortable on the chair. _Very_ comfortable, since the vibe was still going, humming away at her. She blushed heavily and crossed her legs, feeling the intensity picking up as it thrummed against her.  
  
“It makes me happy to see you feeling good,” Sixer said. Susan had no idea if that was true, but Sixer being able to lie would be just as extraordinary. “Please enjoy yourself for as long as you want, Susan.”  
  
Susan blushed at that and shifted around on the chair. The vibe really was feeling startling good. _Very_ good. She blushed and shifted around and tried to breathe in and out, focusing just on… something. She wasn’t sure what but she was focusing on _something_. Something that didn’t involve her wearing a fetish outfit and getting off in front of a camera.  
  
That nobody was on the other side of the camera and nobody _should_ ever see this didn’t make it any easier for Susan to admit to herself what she was doing. She just did her best not to think about and instead considered other things.  
  
Sexy things, actually. A big, handsome man behind her, a small, cute woman in front of her, Susan sandwiched between them and feeling their hands running all over her body. That was _good_ to think about it. It had never, ever happened in Susan’s entire life, but variations on that theme had been running through her head ever since she had been old enough to take an interest in something like that happening.  
  
Susan’s hands were squeezing down on her knees, making sure that there was zero chance of them moving around to the rest of her body. That really wasn’t the kind of show she wanted to put on. Not when she was pretty sure that the vibe was going to be enough to… take care of her _anyway_.  
  
Susan could feel herself starting to leak, starting to stain the skirt she was wearing. Well, that was what the laundry machine was for. Right now, she just shivered and kept on rocking back and forth slightly, putting a bit more pressure down on her pussy, sending some slightly stronger tingles through herself, from head to toe.  
  
It felt _really_ good. Susan took a deep breath, well aware of how that made her chest rise and fall. She was shocked at how horny she was getting now. She might actually cum in a few minutes.  
  
The vibrations stopped. Susan’s eyes snapped open and she stared at the screen.  
  
“What?” Susan screeched. “What was that for, Sixer?”  
  
“Since you don’t have any scheduled calls for today,” Sixer said calmly, “there’s no reason not to prolong this. I believe that it is possible for the vibrations to keep you on the edge of orgasm for the next three hours before you finally climax from it.”  
  
Susan’s eyes went wide at the thought. No, there was just no way that she was going to put up with _this_.


End file.
